Vsauce
- Why ask questions we can't answer?
For thousands of years, Neanderthals barely went anywhere. Humans, however, did things that made no sense, crossing terrain, and water, without knowing what lay ahead. And why do you do that? Is it for glory? For curiosity? It's ridiculous. Foolish, maybe. But it was the Neanderthals who went extinct, not the Humans. Maybe it's only a fool that would perilously journey out to what might not be there. But if you want to solve problems, you don't just solve the ones that are there, you find more.
Charles Sanders Peirce
- Let me read that again. What?
The entire intellectual purport of any symbol consists in the total of all general modes of rational conduct which, conditionally upon all the possible different circumstances and desires, would ensue upon the acceptance of the symbol.
Paul Lockhart
- A Mathematician's Lament
The fact is that there is nothing as dreamy and poetic, nothing as radical, subversive, and psychedelic, as mathematics. It is every bit as mindblowing as cosmology or physics, and allows more freedom of expression than poetry, art, or music. Mathematics is the purest of the arts, as well as the most misunderstood.
Paul Lockhart
- A Mathematician's Lament
Waking up in a cold sweat, the musician realizes, gratefully, that it was all just a crazy dream. "Of course!" he reassures himself, "No society would ever reduce such a beautiful and meaningful art form to something so mindless and trivial; no culture could be so cruel to its children as to deprive them of such a natural, satisfying means of human expression. How absurd!"
Daniel Pink
- Drive
By offering a reward, a principal signals to the agent that the task is undesirable. Pay your son to take out the trash, and you've pretty much guaranteed the kid will never do it again for free.
Joseph Heller
- Catch-22
Each day's delay deepened the awareness and deepened the gloom. The clinging, overpowering conviction of death spread steadily with the continuing rainfall, soaking mordantly into each man's ailing countenance like the corrosive blot of some crawling disease. Everyone smelled of formaldehyde.
Bloons TD Battles
BTD Battles is a multiplayer, real time, competetive version of the Bloons Tower Defense series by Ninja Kiwi, with different strategies, tracks and awards. During a 1v1 match, as rounds progress, stronger and stronger bloons get unlocked, meaning that you will have to improve your defenses. At the same time, players can send stronger and stronger bloons to their opponent to get past their monkeys, and the last player to run out of lives wins the match.
Carsten Bruse
- The Globglogabgalab
I love books! And this basement is a true treasure trove. I am the Globglogabgalab. The shwabble (you thought I was going to make you type it) I'm full of shwibbly liber-kind I am the yeast of thoughts and mind.
Wikipedia
- (Typing Challenge) Death by Laughter
On March 24, 1975, Alex Mitchell, from King's Lynn, England, died laughing while watching the "Kung Fu Kapers" episode of The Goodies, featuring a kilt-clad Scotsman with his bagpipes battling a master of the Lancastrian martial art "Eckythump," who was armed with a black pudding. After 25 minutes of continuous laughter, Mitchell finally slumped on the sofa and died from heart failure.
Edwin Abbott Abbott
- Flatland exerpt out of context
In some of the states there is an additional law forbidding females, under penalty of death, from walking or standing in any public place without moving their backs constantly from right to left so as to indicate their presence to those behind them.
Rudyard Kipling
- If
Impossible, since all these operations ought, intuitively speaking, to preserve the volume. The intuition that such operations preserve volumes is not mathematically absurd and it is even included in the formal definition of volumes. However, this is not applicable here because in this case it is impossible to define the volumes of the considered subsets. Reassembling them reproduces a volume, which happens to be different from t.
Wikipedia
- The Banach-Tarski Paradox
The Banach-Tarski paradox is a theorem in set-theoretic geometry, which states the following: Given a solid ball in 3 dimensional space, there exists a decomposition of the ball into a finite number of disjoint subsets, which can then be put back together in a different way to yield two identical copies of the original ball.
